Pain is a silent epidemic in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans live with chronic pain caused by disease, disorder or accident. Additional millions suffer acute pain resulting from surgery or accident. A majority of these individuals in pain have been living with this affliction for multiple numbers of years. The loss of productivity and daily activity due to pain is substantial. Additionally, it has been estimated that millions of individuals see a physician for chronic pain treatment every year. Thus, our healthcare system is significantly affected by the amount of resources that are allocated to treat pain each year.
One common treatment for sufferers of chronic pain is physical therapy and/or exercise. Often, a physician will prescribe a physical therapy and/or exercise regimen to a chronic pain patient. A regimen includes performing certain exercises or movements for a predefined period of time, one or more times a week. In between visits to the physician, however, there is no currently available way of monitoring the patient's adherence to the regimen. That is, the physician cannot confirm that the patient was performing the exercises properly and at the right frequency in between office visits. Thus, when patient's return to see the physician, the doctor must rely on the patient's memory and the patient's ability to self-report, which may not be completely accurate. Therefore, a doctor providing pain management care today may not have a correct picture of the efficacy of certain physical therapy or exercise regimens on chronic pain sufferers.
To facilitate the provision of care to patients afflicted with pain, healthcare professionals often develop a risk profile of the patient that defines the risk of the patient further worsening his or her current affliction, developing additional sources of pain or having a recurrence of pain. Currently, however, there is no precise or automated way to generate a risk profile for patients experiencing pain. Further, there is no exhaustive risk profile generation process that takes multitudes of factors into account, such as demographic data of the patient. Another problem associated with the treatment of chronic pain is the ability to precisely define results or outcomes when monitoring and tracking a patient's progress. Because the perception of pain can be subjective and because various, and sometimes different, factors can be considered when evaluating the results of pain treatment, there is no generally-accepted paradigm for defining results precisely. In the medical field, this leads to a great disparity in how success or failure of a pain treatment plan is determined.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for improving upon the problems with the prior art, and more particularly for a more efficient and precise way of managing a patient's chronic pain over a communications network.